W1 At GDC
It's been a while since our last blog post, but we've been hard at work continuing development on the game. All that hard work has paid off because W1 was at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week. GDC is an annual conference that takes place in San Francisco where game developers from all over the world attend, network, learn from each other, and help each other out for an entire week. We were there to get external feedback and validation about W1 in a series of behind closed doors playtests and meetings with other developers. GDC also turned out to be a small marketing beat for us as many new people are now aware of the game that didn't know about it before. While not everyone there was our target demographic, all marketing is good marketing as they say. Some of those people that were marketed to are even reading this right now. Hi!
GDC 2024 (Image from GameIndustry.biz)
What Did People Say?
A majority of the people that played W1 were actually really excited for the premise of the game and generally liked what we had. This was extremely motivating for the team. However, there were two trends in the feedback that we saw.
- First, the main loop between the player and enemies wasn't quite where it should be. This is something we generally expected based on where combat was in this build, but there was more than we expected. This is our main focus going forward as a game that has a lackluster main loop is a game that isn't fun.
- Secondly, our art was called out as being lackluster. Again, this was expected since the GDC build had a lot of temp assets. We're slowly replacing those assets as we finish them up so we're not too worried about this one. The feedback we got about it was very helpful though on triaging which assets need to replaced first and leaning further into what people did like about the art direction.
Getting feedback is invaluable during the game development process, it helps us see through the player's eyes. All feedback is good feedback. For more info about playtests, check out our previous blog here.
What's Next?
If you're bummed that you couldn't get a glimpse of the game or play it yourself, don't worry, we're gearing up soon for a public demo that anyone can play. We'll have more details on when to expect this demo as we get closer to its release. For now you'll have to wait in anticipation. Until then, we'll be seeing you in the next blog post! Do you want to hear about the game's art direction, the game loop, or something else? Let us know down below.